This chapter applies the rent-conditional reform theory to the case of Nigeria across the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It illustrates how, under the banner of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Goodluck Jonathan’s government coupled company creation liberalization for would-be entrepreneurs with generous awards and support for strategically placed business magnates and interest groups. Once the price of oil began to fall, and the disintegration of the PDP’s elite coalition gathered pace, Jonathan’s government quickly jettisoned the reform initiative within the Corporate Affairs Commission to placate rapidly defecting business magnates. Following the election of Muhammadu Buhari, the business creation reform agenda was similarly manipulated to develop an alliance between his nascent government and the elite business class. Once that relationship was in place, and oil rents were recovering, generous privileges were once again afforded to key magnates, and corporate regulatory liberalization went into overdrive in 2016, culminating in 2020 with the reform of the thirty-year-old Companies and Allied Matters Act.

This chapter provides an overview of the core findings of the book. It outlines the key theoretical and methodological insights gained through a qualitative comparison of the politics of corporate regulation and liberalization in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, including the introduction of the theory of rent-conditional reforms. It further outlines the relevance of the rent-conditional reform theory to ongoing debates around the political and economic effects of natural resource wealth, particularly amid the potential global transition toward a less carbon-intensive economy.

This chapter advances three primary arguments about the politics of corporate regulation in twentieth-century Saudi Arabia. First, that the state’s legislative regulation of company creation was the product of two often-opposing pressures: the private sector’s demand for a domestic regulatory environment that reflects prevailing international norms, and the religious establishment’s reticence to cede their traditional competences. Second, that Ibn Saud’s legislative initiatives in the early 1930s constituted a critical juncture, after which subsequent Saudi kings would promulgate corporate reforms, while the religious establishment would contest their judicial recognition. These tensions pushed judicial institutional development into a pattern of oscillation between unification and separate systems for corporate issues. Third, that the 1990 Gulf War and the contemporaneous liberal and conservative reform movements constitute another somewhat broader critical juncture in Saudi politics. Cross-class movements for greater political influence tangibly shaped corporate regulations, the state’s political institutions, and, consequently, how any future regulations would be formulated.

This chapter introduces the arguments and structure of the book. It surveys how the liberalization of company creation regulations in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia across the first two decades of the twenty-first century defy the predictions of the existing resource curse literature. To explain the political constrains on economic liberalization in resource-wealthy, autocratic and hybrid regimes, the chapter introduces the rent-conditional reform theory. It also details the shortcomings of earlier quantitative studies of economic regulation and liberalization in contexts of resource wealth and outlines the methodological innovations of this book.

This chapter presents a theoretical model of the conditions under which natural resource-wealthy, autocratic and hybrid regimes pursue or eschew the liberalization of domestic economic regulations in the twenty-first century. I term this the rent-conditional reform theory. This model focuses on three salient groups: political elites who devise and implement policy, economic elites who enjoy non-competitive privileges, and the non-elite citizenry who may or may not participate in private entrepreneurship. This model illustrates the demands and constraints both economic elites and the citizenry impose upon political elites amid the pursuit of economic liberalization.

This chapter examines the financing of ISIS and how the United States and the international community were able to thwart ISIS’s access to finance through a combination of methods, including the use of sanctions, the prosecutions of foreign terrorist fighters, and an aggressive bombing campaign.

Between 2015 and 2022, the Venezuelan economy was crumbling to an extent otherwise only seen in war-ridden economies. This collapse is mostly attributed to failed economic governance and the collapse of the oil sector, the most important contributor to the country’s foreign income. However, starting in 2017, the US imposed sectoral sanctions limiting financial transactions and oil and gold exports from Venezuela. The main debate about the effects of the US-imposed sanctions has been about their relative responsibility for the plummeting oil-production. This chapter instead discusses the impact of sanctions on the Venezuelan non-oil private sector. Sanctions affected companies through a credit crunch and severe limitations in access to supplies and markets. The sanctions have had the overall effect of informalizing and increasingly criminalizing the Venezuelan economy, while we also see the emergence of a new business elite with close ties to the government. We argue that in the case of Venezuela, sanctions were counterproductive as they had strong negative impacts on groups sharing the cause of those imposing the sanctions. In this case, US-imposed sanctions weakened and divided the private sector (as much as the Venezuelan opposition), which has been a main supporter of the political opposition supporting the US goal of regime change.

The final chapter generalizes the theoretical development from other chapters of this book to states in different regions. Venezuela, similar to Zimbabwe, has also experienced many similar dynamics: hyperinflation, decline of the formal sector, and while at one time having a similar if not better level of development to other countries in its region, has now fallen distinctly behind. However, similar to ZANU-PF and the large diamond production after 2006, the PSUV in Venezuela also had a source of funding to perpetuate its rule after 2012: alluvial gold. Eritrea also has some similarities to Venezuela and Zimbabwe, as they have produced and continued to discover a large amount of resource wealth in a single-party dominant political system. Nonetheless, Eritrea may have avoided some of the extreme pitfalls of Venezuela and Zimbabwe. The rapid increase in Zimbabwean diamond wealth and the resulting “opaque” institutions provide lessons for states with a large amount of resource wealth. This study illustrates that different types of resources offer some commonalities but also distinctly different challenges for the institutional trajectory of states and overall capacity.

In the first years of the twenty-first century, Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush sought to develop a strategic and economic partnership. Yet by 2007 US–Russian relations were marked by friction, and after 2012 they deteriorated into bitter enmity. This chapter argues that blaming the degeneration of relations on the KGB background, paranoia, and imperial ambitions of Putin is too simple and one-sided. It shows that the United States also spurred the decline by supporting “color revolutions” in countries around Russia, promoting NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, pushing regime change in countries such as Syria, Libya, and Venezuela, and placing missile defense systems in Eastern Europe. Although Russia and the United States cooperated on a strategic arms reduction treaty, Russian entry into the World Trade Organization, and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, conflict increasingly overshadowed such collaboration. That outcome was not inevitable. Instead, unwise policy choices led to clashes, dishonest statements eroded trust, needlessly provocative rhetoric exacerbated tensions, and media sensationalism inflamed antipathies between Americans and Russians.

This chapter delves into the multifaceted challenges and strategic approaches associated with energy pricing reform policies in the Gulf states, focusing on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. This chapter provides a rigorous analysis of the steps implemented until the early 2020s, investigating their multifaceted implications for economic development, environmental sustainability, and long-term fiscal stability. Furthermore, it critically examines the institutional barriers that could impede the comprehensive implementation of energy pricing reform.

Chapter 2 turns to loco-descriptive lyric poetry, read in the context of expanding highway infrastructure. It opens with a consideration of oil maps deposited in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, some of which critique the expropriation of former Ottoman territories by Anglo-American cartels. At that very locus, the Iraqi modernist poet Nazik al-Malā’ikah envisioned a very different kind of energy poetics, where the dividing line between oil’s extractive and consumptive spheres is decidedly smudged. In postcolonial counterpoint, the chapter closes by reading the automotive aesthetics in Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. The US highway system provides them with a conflicted linguistic resource, where the trace of oil’s violent extraction is smeared by the exhilarations of their lyrics.

This chapter takes a comparative approach to fossil fuel narratives to consider whether there are continuities between coal fiction and oil fiction in different periods of modernity and whether there are identifiable formal features that unify fossil fuel fiction. The chapter pursues these questions by examining correspondences between Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water, which depicts the socio-environmental consequences of oil extraction in the Niger Delta, and several exemplary fictions of extraction written 100 or 150 years earlier, including Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Joseph Conrad’s ‘Youth’ (1898) and Heart of Darkness (1899), and D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913). The commonalities that persist across the historical gap from coal fiction to oil fiction express distinguishing aspects of life under fossil fuels and constitutive elements of the writing of fossil fuels.

Are civil conflicts driven by resource crises? Research suggests that the root of conflict, in part, is explained when analyzing how economic deprivation drives groups into turmoil. Resource ownership, especially when unevenly distributed, often leads to violence. Research remains divided, however, on which resources drive violence, and the precise mechanisms that are involved. While many scholars argue that inequality drives violence, there exist many other factors that can help to explain civil wars. Evidence in this chapter suggests that while oil dependence may trigger conflicts, the duration of conflict is heavily influenced by factors beyond resources alone. Contrarily, agricultural commodities lack significant ties to civil war onset or duration, challenging our understanding of deprivation on a country-specific basis. Conflict is inextricably tied to maintaining political order, which for resource-rich countries hinges on interacting factors that governance structures facilitate. Further analysis on these topics – like the greed, state capacity, and grievance frameworks – offers strong insights into why violence emerges, giving multiple avenues and case studies as evidence for explaining civil wars overall.

The introductory chapter is a brief recap on the history and origins of wind power, from windmills in ancient times to today’s multi-megawatt turbines. Energy security has arguably been the historic driver for wind power, and it was a primary source of mechanical power until the advent of the Industrial revolution when it was superceded by coal and oil. The first electricity generating wind turbines were built in the late nineteenth centry, and the technology was pursued most vigorously in Denmark, a country with limited energy reserves: the role of this country in creating the modern wind turbine is described. The worldwide energy crisis of the 1970s brought wind power into the frame internationally, and the pivotal role of legislation under President Carter in expanding the market for wind energy in the US and elsewhere is outlined. Since then the rationale for wind power has expanded to include climate change and the technology has grown exponentially in terms of global installation of wind power and the physical size of wind turbines. The chapter concludes by introducing some of the technological steps that have enabled this process, and which are detailed in subsequent chapters.

This chapter explores the knowledge creation aspect of contemporary tax reforms in Nigeria. It offers a historical perspective on this process which lets us see today’s reforms not only as the re-creation of long-retreated systems of state taxation-led ordering, but against the backdrop of what intervened in the meantime – a four-decade late-twentieth-century interregnum where revenue reliance on oil profits created a very different distributive system of government-as-knowledge. Today’s system of tax-and-knowledge is not just reform but an inversion of what came before.

This chapter explains what has been meant by energy security in different periods and research contexts. It elaborates on the history of energy security research and creates a typology of internal and external dimensions of energy security. Subsequently, the chapter describes the research on the geopolitics of energy, focusing on the geopolitics of renewable energy and the different implications envisaged to unfold from the energy transition. The chapter ends with a brief summary of the EU’s approach to energy security. The chapter, thereby, creates a research context for the empirical analyses conducted in this book.

I introduce the topic, theme, central argument of the study, and its setting in Gulf petro-monarchies. I discuss the relevant scholarly literature, especially as it concerns ways in which religion (and specifically, Islam) has been used by political actors to advance particular interests. I provide a detailed elaboration of the argument and its various parts, as well as the method of analysis and justification for the choice of cases. I then discuss the context and cases in greater detail, with attention to key features of the historical development of the petro-monarchies from their pre-oil contact with the British imperial power, the arrival of oil companies, the importation of labor, the definition of borders and emergence of “modern” states. I illustrate noteworthy structural peculiarities of each of the four states. Finally, I outline the architecture of the manuscript, with an overview of each chapter.